templation of that picture which called to my mind with irresistible
force another picture, seen many years before. It was a picture of vivid
colouring and violently complex action--the Emperor Vitellius coming
down a steep, narrow street with the mob and the soldiery hacking and
yelling and spitting around him, his gross corpulence rolling and
rearing and staggering, the rich robes ripping away from the creases of
sleezy tissue, the bright blood spurting from neck and arms, the eyes
rolling wide, in a naked horror of dissolution, toward the flawless
blue of a Roman sky. And the recollection was not so irrelevant as you
might imagine. Captain Macedoine wore a voluminous bath robe of dark
purple and he wore sandals on his feet. As he descended he rolled and
staggered, and his supporters rolled and staggered to maintain
themselves and him, all this commotion giving the little group the
complicated activity of a crowd of people wrestling with an old man in a
purple robe. And Mrs. Sarafov advanced to assist him, running up several
steps and raising an arm, as though to strike, but with the real
intention of support. I remember, too, the small wayward feet and the
thick, smooth, hairless calves beneath the robe, strange in one so
decrepit. I daresay, you know, he would have been something of that sort
in that part of the world twenty generations earlier. Perhaps there was
something aback of his adumbrations concerning his ancient lineage.
Perhaps he was not simply a ship chandler in a small way, but the
reincarnation of some sinister pro-consul who sat on the terrace of his
marble villa among the distant ranges, and watched with a contemptuous
and intellectual sneer the hordes of peasantry as they trudged into the
cities to sacrifice their daughters to the savage and inexorable
Cabirian deities. I had that fantastic notion as they paused at the
foot of the stair and he moved his head slowly from side to side, the
mouth pursed, the eyes set in a stony, unseeing stare, the bathrobe of
purple towelling slipping from one shoulder. And then they moved forward
again, away from me, into a room sparsely set with French furniture and
dominated by a lofty chandelier still shrouded in its summer muslin, and
the door swung to, leaving me to contemplate the picture in its
tarnished frame of the body of Hector being brought back to Troy.

"And I must have sat there, in a sort of cane lounge, for a long time,
since when we emerged from the